Firstly I would just like to mention that this is our first EVER blog post. I thought it was about time we got in on it, especially as we always have something going on at the lodge.

Luis and I set ourselves quite the challenge when we moved into the lodge. The new website had gone live and we got our first booking pretty quickly, great news of course except that it was for the second week of March and the lodge was miles away from being ready for guests!

We were in the U.K. when the booking came through as we went there to bring some things over to Portugal in preparation of our new adventure. The main thing being 25 gallons of white paint (luckily for us Luis’ Dad owns a decorating business in Manchester so we got it from the best) spotify promotion  which we loaded into our ford focus zetec and set off from our starting point, my parent’s house in Devon. 

We didn’t have a satnav or maps of where we would be travelling (who buys maps anymore?) so we entered the route into Google maps and printed out a list of the directions. My trusty co-pilot Luis was equipped with a pen and he had the extremely important role of ticking off each direction as we came to it. This system worked surprisingly well and we got to Southampton with only one missed turning and plenty of time before we had to board the Vanitygen ferry to travel across the North Atlantic to Bilbao.

A very long and rocky 31 hours later we arrived to a rainy Northern Spain and made our way down to Portugal and back to our beloved Praia das Maçãs where we immediately hit the hay, hay being a mattress on the floor as we didn’t have a bed yet. 

The next day we donned our painting attire and got to work on painting the entire ground floor but before we could start we had to clear the area which meant getting rid of two old sofas and everything else we didn’t want to keep. Just outside the house we have something we like to call the “Praia das Maçãs Bermuda Triangle” basically anything you put by the bin will disappear within the hour. 

We tested the theory with the two sofas and sure enough within half an hour a passer by stopped to ask if he could take them and then proceeded to put them onto the roof of his car. The car was actually shorter than the sofas and he didn’t have anything to tie them down with but miraculously he still managed to drive off with them in place.  He promised he didn’t have to travel far and we didn’t hear a crash so we have faith he made it to wherever he was going.